My statement was based on the number of people who regularly complain that it's not quick and easy to get funds into MtGox. (Note that I said "I think", not "I guarantee".)

It's my own experience too. If I could get PayPal funds into MtGox "instantly", I would buy bitcoins there.

If people could get money into MtGox using PayPal or a credit card, I think those offers would be filled very quickly.

Naah. Price dropped because you stopped buying.

I wonder if that person sold because they saw S3052's red text earlier in this thread.

It would make a really great April Fools joke to hack the website and put that image there.

Will this eventually become the world's first million-dollar pizza?

Those who are active at Wikipedia may wish to declare that their Wikipedia contributions are public domain. Just add this shortcode to your Wikipedia user page:

I think you gotta be a little crazy to know real passion.

You don't have to use the ICANN root domain servers. Lots of groups use alternative DNS roots, although you're never going to see a Windows OS that defaults to anything other than the ICANN root.

This is what creates fear amongst those who depend on the current copyright system for their livelihood, but I don't think it's a valid issue.

Without copyright, creators will get rewarded on the incremental value that they add to what is already out there. They're not forced to build a walled garden in which to do their creative work. This really is quite liberating.

The carpenter who hangs the doors in my house gets well-rewarded for what he does. He doesn't need a state-granted monopoly that forces me to pay him $0.01 every time someone opens that door for the next 95 years.

Nicely drawn! And safe for my work, but then again I'm self-employed.

That's an interesting analogy.

One of the predecessors of Wikipedia was Nupedia, a free encyclopedia being developed by qualified people. I didn't think it was crazy - I thought it was a great way to expand free culture.

I knew it wasn't perfect, but I couldn't articulate what needed to be fixed to make it succeed. And indeed it didn't succeed. When the notion of a wiki and an encyclopedia were joined, I knew that this one would really succeed.

Maybe it's the same with Bitcoin. It might succeed. Or maybe it's the next one that will really succeed. I reckon bitcoin has a 30% chance of making the kind of difference to the world that Wikipedia made.

Anyway, back to the topic of this post ("Re: I am 19. WTF Do I know?"), I wish I knew half as much as kiba when I was 19.

Darn it, Kiba, you're doing very well out of me financially. Because I didn't save the image, I had to download it again. Each time I just close the browser window, thinking I won't need to see that version of the image again.

And no, I'm not confused. I'm talking about the hand that is higher up. It is over the girl's right breast, and the elbow is by her left side. So it's her left hand for sure. And yet the thumb is shown at the bottom.

You try to pose your own body in her position, and you will see that the thumb just can't go that way.

Don't forget, the girl's left shoulder is on the right of the drawing as we look at it, because the girl is facing us.

But although it's anatomically wrong, I kind of like it because it adds quite some ambiguity to the picture, i.e. "just what is going on here?".

Anyway, this time I'm saving the image for a couple of days, in case you manage to convince me that right is left and left is right.

Hey, you forgot about FTP!

And point your Firefox at this one:
gopher://gopher.docfile.org/1/world/monitoring/uptime

But, flippancy aside, I take your point.

I mean the hand that appears to be clutching her right breast. If that's her right hand, there is some very odd contortion going on. And if it's her left hand, the thumb needs to be at the top.

Unless it really is someone else's right hand.

I know the JMRI court case well, but it's not a counterexample because (1) no-one gave anything away into the public domain (the software was permissively licensed), and (2) Katzer sued the original author for infringing his patent, NOT for infringing copyright.

For sure, the patent system is seriously broken, as is the court system, but even so Katzer lost in the end and "good guy" Jacobsen won.

Sorry, you misunderstand. The server operator only pays out to easy hashes that were submitted for a block that is won. There's no payout for easy hashes that were submitted for a block that someone else generates.

The difficulty can't change in the middle of a block. It always changes at a known time, and you always know exactly what the difficulty is, so there's no risk here.


That's absolutely true, but over time probability tends towards mathematical certainty. If the server operator is getting a few percent of the generated bitcoins, it doesn't take long to become virtually guaranteed profit.

Isn't the left hand the wrong way around? If I fold my left hand over my chest, my thumb is at the top, but you seem to have drawn the thumb at the bottom of the hand.

<sigh>

Either I haven't been very good at explaining why there's no possibility to cheat, or I'm wrong. But if I'm wrong, no-one has posted a specific objection. So I'll try to explain it again, by presenting a specific design to show that a dishonest client cannot cheat.

Suppose I operate a pooled mining server, and I recruit some clients who wish to pool their mining.

My server asks each client to do some hashing for it. It asks each client to submit any hashes they find that are above a certain threshold of difficulty. The server chooses a difficulty that is one-fortieth (1/40th) of the current "official" difficulty level.

My server gets a constant trickle of candidate hashes sent back by the remote mining clients. Every now and then, one of those hashes meets the official difficulty level and my server can generate a block, which earns my server 50 bitcoins.

I now distribute bitcoins to the remote mining clients, at the rate of one bitcoin for each hash that was submitted for the current block that was at or above 1/40th of the official difficulty level.

In the long run, I would expect to distribute 40 coins out of every 50 that my server generates, although there will be some fluctuation from block to block. Nothing in this scheme requires the clients to be honest, because there is no way that a dishonest client can cheat!

The client is calculating hashes that will generate 50 BTC for my server. Those same hashes are not of any use to a dishonest client. They cannot be used to generate 50 BTC for the dishonest client, because a different hash code is needed to encode the payment of the generated bitcoins to someone else. And if the dishonest client tries to cheat by generating hashes that will pay the generated bitcoins to themselves, then the hash codes they submit won't validate at my server and I won't distribute any share of the payouts to them.

So this scheme requires absolutely no trust of the client.

This scheme also does not require the mining client to have faith that the server is honest. If the server advertises that it is paying out 1BTC for each hash that is at least 1/40th of the official difficulty level, then every client that submits an "easy" hash for a block that was generated can check that they received their bitcoin. Any fraud would show up immediately.

Sorry, I already deleted your image (and I'm not going to pay again to download it again), but I think the left hand was across the woman's stomach. The finger shapes, and the smudge that could have been hair on the back of the hand, made it look masculine to me.